Violent past of Milky Way’s giant black hole revealed

Washington – NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has helped find evidence that the normally dim region very close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, flared up with at least two luminous outbursts in the past few hundred years.

This discovery comes from a new study of rapid variations in the X-ray emission from gas clouds surrounding the supermassive black hole, a.k.a. Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short.

The scientists showed that the most probable interpretation of these variations is that they are caused by light echoes.

The echoes from Sgr A* were likely produced when large clumps of material, possibly from a disrupted star or planet, fell into the black hole.

Some of the X-rays produced by these episodes then bounced off gas clouds about thirty to a hundred light years away from the black hole, similar to how the sound from a person’s voice can bounce off canyon walls.

Just as echoes of sound reverberate long after the original noise was created, so too do light echoes in space replay the original event.

While light echoes from Sgr A* have been seen before in X-rays by Chandra and other observatories, this is the first time that evidence for two distinct outbursts has been seen within a single set of data.

More than just a cosmic parlor trick, light echoes provide astronomers an opportunity to piece together what objects like Sgr A* were doing long before there were X-ray telescopes to observe them.

The X-ray echoes suggest that the area very close to Sgr A* was at least a million times brighter within the past few hundred years.

X-rays from the outbursts (as viewed in Earth’s time frame) that followed a straight path would have arrived at Earth at that time.

However, the reflected X-rays in the light echoes took a longer path as they bounced off the gas clouds and only reached Chandra in the last few years.

The findings have been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.